REVIEW: Area Stage Director Gives Audience Seat at the Table for Disney's Beauty and the Beast

REVIEW: Area Stage Director Gives Audience Seat at the Table for Disney's Beauty and the Beast

Since its 1991 debut as an Oscar-winning animated movie, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast spawned a 1994 Broadway musical that ran until 2007 (in 5,461 performances), toured the country, and played all over the world. The show has endured as an immensely popular title for regional, community, and school theater groups.

Now Beauty and the Beast is back, this time as an Area Stage Company production in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. But the show, which opens on Friday, August 12, is not a typical version of the Disney hit.

REVIEW: Area Stage's This Is Our Youth Examines A Lost Generation

REVIEW: Area Stage's This Is Our Youth Examines A Lost Generation

Come with playwright Kenneth Lonergan and Area Stage Company as they travel back in time circa 1982 on a Margaret Mead-like archeological expedition to explore the sociological jungle of Manhattan as born-rich 20-somethings give birth to the Me Generation.

Watch pot-selling, coke-sniffing young adults adrift with angst, anxiety, loneliness and the unspoken fear at the buried knowledge that they have no idea who they are or what kind of future they will have – or, more importantly, that they want.

REVIEW: ‘BE MORE CHILL’ EARNS AREA STAGE A PLACE AT THE COOL KIDS’ TABLE

REVIEW: ‘BE MORE CHILL’ EARNS AREA STAGE A PLACE AT THE COOL KIDS’ TABLE

Just when you start to worry that Be More Chill might be shaping up to be a conventional coming of age comedy, it instead takes a turn for the gloriously insane. This is Area Stage Company’s first show as a tenant of the Adrienne Arsht Center, and the partnership is definitely getting off to a smashing start with this high-strung high school musical.

REVIEW: ‘BE MORE CHILL’ BRINGS AREA STAGE TO THE ARSHT CENTER

REVIEW: ‘BE MORE CHILL’ BRINGS AREA STAGE TO THE ARSHT CENTER

Ah, the teen years. Navigating that fraught passage from childhood to adulthood has never been easy. For many kids, it’s a journey filled with emotional land mines: grappling with identity, popularity, intimacy and more.